Rambling Around Calgary

The other day, Tall and I went out for supper. The restaurant we went to was small and on a Tuesday night, there was a birthday party and two other tables. Normally, this means the waitress will dote on Tall and me, because he’s naturally gregarious, and I’m manipulative.

Due to the nature of the restaurant, we barely saw her. It was mostly a buffet, so the one cute girl who was working showed us to our table, took our drink order, and then vanished into the back. When she came back, she dropped off our drinks and said in an Aussie accent “There you go.”

When she left I turned to Tall and asked “Did she have that when we sat down?”

“What, the accent?”

He looked at me as though I was really dumb. “Yeah. Of course she did.”

We enjoyed the rest of the meal without seeing much of her, because, well, buffet. It was really a shame, because over years, Tall and I have perfected bantering with waitresses and cashiers. There’s a long line of Denny’s servers and Safeway clerks who long for the gentle giant and the charming rogue who came through their life, for a few fleeting moments of bliss. It kills Tall when he has something to say to the waitress, some opening that he can’t use because she hasn’t come back. He loves to get her talking, and then see where I take it, because I build off his foundations.

That’s important, because he’s married, so he won’t do more than start a conversation, and then he’s stuck not wanting to offend the poor girl, so he’s trying to emphasize his wedding ring before she falls hopelessly in love with him.

Being a wise man, he knew that there is one fatal mistake that will piss off a certain type of girl; never call a Kiwi an Australian. The same way that Canadians hate to be mistaken for Americans, New Zealanders hate being mistook for their larger neighbors.

So when she came to give us the bill, he said to her “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place your accent. Where are you from?”

“Whales,” she smiled.

“I’m glad I asked. I was afraid I would’ve guessed wrong,” he oozed all his natural charm.

“I was just afraid you’d be Welsh,” I chirped. JACKPOT! I have an enormous repertoire of jokes about the Welsh, and absolutely no reason to use them. At least, not until we found this girl.

The birthday table wanted her to come over, but she was torn. She thought Tall was geniunely sweet and I was funnier than God, because you would need to be a comedic genius to know that the Welsh are to be mocked in Calgary. “Yeah,” she said in an accent which sounds about as Welsh as a kangaroo named Bruce throwing another shrimp on the barbie, “No one ever gets it right.”

Wonder why…

“Everyone always thinks I’m Australian.”

Tall nodded knowingly, but before we could add anything else, the birthday table was nearly shouting. “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” she excused herself. “Have a great night.”

As we left, Tall said, “We have to come back. She nearly loves you.”

I nodded. “Next time, if she doesn’t recognize us,” which is a big if, considering Tall is 6’6, “I’m gonna ask her ‘Can you settle a bet? Are you Welsh?”

I’m going to own her heart like a Welshman owns a crippling addiction to cheap beer.

Some things are really hard to compliment. For example, I think girls with big ears are cute.

Girls like Amy Smart

I like the type of ears that, when a girl wears her hair down, the tops of them stick out. I doubt this is common, because all my google fu was useless in finding pictures of unnamed cute girls with big ears.

It sounds like an insult, doesn’t it? Big ears. Like I’m going around mocking elephants.

I am not attracted to elephants with big ears. Just girls.

In fact, most girls that have them, I assume were teased for them. They hide them, under specially designed hair cuts and hats and other optical illusions that girls know to make me think they look different than they actually do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally a fan of the spectacle, all the work the ladies do to impress … well someone else, but I still benefit from the visuals.

This one, however, it makes me said. Even if I want to tell a girl “Your ears are so cute” she bulks. It’s like I’ve built my own “Do these pants make me look fat?” trap. It’s like an unescapable, back-handed compliment, and unless you’re a pick up artist playing with negs, it doesn’t really work.

If you didn’t know, negs are semi-mean compliments designed to throw a cute girl out of her comfort zone, and make her work to impress you. It’s a tricky game to play with the ladies, especially because you can get accidentally mean, and you shouldn’t fake a sense of humour you don’t have. Plus, I sincerely like her ears, and if she’s feeling like she needs to compensate for them, I done screwed up.

Is this just me? Am I the only one who thinks big earls are cute? Because Google Image Search suggests I might be. I mean, if most of my top five celebrity crushes didn’t have them, I never would have been able to give you this other example of Jordana Brewster

Who has been kind enough not to slap a restraining order on me

And I’m pretty sure, even in the two pictures I’ve provided, those girls have minimized their ears. I couldn’t find many good ones.

Oh!

Zooey Deschanel!

Here’s a good one! Zooey Deschanel! Why don’t we see more girls with those kind of cute ears? That is exactly the look I’m thinking of, and I would be happy to see more of it.

And, this blog was written in February of 2011. I mention that explicitly so that the next time I get in a fight over a girl over whether or not I was being sincere when I tell her her big ears are adorable, or sexy, or whatever adjective I use to get what I want from her, I have this as proof. There, future girl, I wrote this before I met you, so now you have to forgive me, and realize, I really like those ears.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know my PTP project, where I’ve been posting bits of my novel here to generate interest and criticism.

It didn’t work.

The novel segments had the lowest hits of my work. It didn’t generate interest. People didn’t read it, didn’t favour it, didn’t comment on it. Obviously, it doesn’t belong in a blog.

I’ve individual blogs that have more hits than the entirety of the novel. I know why too. People don’t come to the internet to read serialized novelization. It’s not what I do. I don’t read anyone elses work like that, and I’m not surprised they don’t read mine.

This doesn’t mean I’m not still working on it. I’m just not putting it here.

I also have a better idea. One that will generate traffic. The only thing is, I doubt this is the right audience.

So I’ll probably start a second blog, that’ll be related to this one, but have different content. It may mean I take one of the updates away from this blog. It’ll likely mean this one goes to Tuesday and Thursday, and I’ll do the other on Monday. I haven’t decided.

The idea for the new project is to analyze video games like literature. Short articles, using the skills from my English degree, to go into the plot of video games. There’s a lot of reviewers out there, but they talk about if a game is good or bad generally. They don’t look at what the characterization means, what themes are explored, what’s being said or not said.

I think people would read that. I think I would love to write that. So I’ll be looking at doing that. I’ll let you know when a final decision is made.

I have never had an angry break-up. When I leave a girl, it’s always a sad affair, and it always seems to end the same way.

The choices I’ve made always seem to tear me away from some cute girl I love. It’s never about us, it’s something I have to do. My fragile ambition is always stronger than my fractured love. I always hate losing her, but I have to go. It’ll be pre-dawn, in her dark bedroom. It’s always her room. I always go to them, afraid of what they’ll see if they come to me. No one says much, all the desperate, tearful goodbyes spit out in the dead of night. We’re both emotionally exhausted, physically drained, and ready to be alone with ourselves. It’s too hard to see each other, so the lights stay off.

I gather up the last debris I have scattered, and grab a packed bag. I’m always going far away, too far for us to stay us. There’s a few whispered words of regret, and a last embrace that lasts a moment too long, making me believe that I could just stay, that everything could revert, that I can still chose love over life.

But the bell’s been rung, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Staying would make things worst. Now, I need to go.

There’s always a song. Maybe it’s Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2 playing on her radio, admitting what we had was always futile. Maybe it’s Josh Ritter’s Last Temptation of Adam in my car as I drive away, a constant worry that if we had been comfortable, we wouldn’t have been us. Sometimes the song isn’t something poignant, or related, but it remains forever hers.

I drive into that highway sunrise, lost in the song, lingering in the last kiss. Some part of me always wants to turn back, instead of heading to that burning beacon of all the long lonely days without her. Some beautiful lie, some excuse as to why I’ve returned; I left something behind.

There’s a piece of me still with her.

And the mistake I always make, months or years later, is the belief that I could go back for it. I dream that the memory of me is still shining in some lost corner. Somehow, I’m always wrong. I’ve remembered things too … too far from what they were. I go back, and try to make reality conform to my vision of the past.

I think I can have back that piece of me. But it wasn’t mine, not when I went out that door. It’s hers, and she can do with it what she likes, but it’ll never be part of the me that’s come back for it.

The lesson I never seem to learn is that when you go away, you’re gone.

It’s at the John Dutton Theatre in the Calgary Public Library, at 8 pm. Tickets are $15, $10 for CPL members, and you can preorder at www.pumphousetheatre.ca. So, why are you going?

Well, it’s awesome. If I can see through the vodka fueled haze, back to the halcyon days when the comedic playwright genius Amos Altman was reading me snippets of the play in the bohemian apartment we shared over a bakery in Nazi Occupied France, struggling to protect refugees as part of the resistance, well, it’s brilliant. Is is possible I’m misremembering some of it, but I know the play is funny, even if Cliff insisted on removing all the best/gayest parts.

It’s a story of mistaken identity and a hitman, and Accidental Humour does amazing stuff where they use multi-media to enhance the show. It’ll flip seamlessly between pre-recorded segments and live action, so it’s like a play and a movie. It’s exciting, and intense, and hilarious, and other words that generate excitement and make you realize you really want to see this show.

If you think you can’t get there, shut up. There’s busses. All busses lead to the Calgary library. And I’m not just talking about Calgarians. You can take a bus from Edmonton or Lethbridge, or (shudder) even Red Deer, and then from the Grey Hound station it’s easy to get to the library. Come on, no one’s getting a head chopped off over this.

And here’s why you should put in the effort.

I shouldn't have to put pictures like this on my computer.

Even if you’ve never watched Jersey Shore, you probably know who the Situation is. If not … it’s that guy, obviously. See, too much of our money is going to him. Jersey Shore makes more than Greece each year. As consumers, the people who make entertainment only listen to your money. So you need to take your fifteen dollars, pull yourself away from the TV and come see this play.

Some of you are thinking, “What’s the harm? It’s just one guy, and he has a sort of charm, like if you mixed John Travolta from Grease with Lenny from of Mice and Men. It can be fun to watch Jersey Shore with ironic hipster detachment, and we can control it. There’s only one.”

Well, friends, step into The Wayback Machine, to a year 2001, when a band showed up. Sure, they were rather repetitive, and derivative, but they weren’t hurting anyone. People liked their music, and they sold a gillion dollars in CDs.

CDs are a prehistoric medium for storing music, before iPods. You bought them with money, because pirating was hard back then.

We all thought “It’s just one band” and we were smart. Too smart for our own good. We had Napster, so we didn’t pay for our music. So everyone thought that only this band was awesome, because they got all the money. That band was…

...and they're calling from inside your house!

So basically, if you don’t go to this show, we’re going to end up with Theory of a Situation, Situationseeether, and a flood of Situation clones. So stop it, before it’s too much, and go watch this instead.

Otherwise, it’ll be your fault. We’ll be running around in a post-apocolyptic douchebag wasteland, fighting for gas, Mad Max style, because you were too lazy or cheap to go see a great play.

Valentine’s Day is almost like Halloween’s evil twin. Sure, there’s candy, but you don’t give it out to strangers. I’m given to understand that there’s sexy costumes, but they’re only in private.

Unfair, Karla, unfair.

I say given to understand, because I have always been single on Valentine’s Day. Yep, never had a date on February 14th. It was last year when I realized the true implications of that fact; if I’ve always been single on Valentine’s Day, it means I’ve never been a relationship that lasted a full year.

I nearly made it once. I started dating a girl in March, and January neared its end, and things were … well, they were alright. But then, it was like something snapped in my head come February, like I subconsciously realized I was about to settle down in some way. I somehow managed to sabotage everything by February 10th, thus saving me a couple hundred dollars in lavish displays of affection.

Yeah, I’m kind of a dick, but at least I’m generous.

My brother is just like me. He’s never been anything but single on Valentine’s Day. You know, until this year.

Et Tu, Brutus?

He started dating a girl a few months back, and apparently, Stadelmann Brother Tradition isn’t enough to convince him to dump her.

Sure, she’s also cool, and smart, and has excellent taste in TV, and she’s definitely too good for him, so he needs to latch onto her like a barnacle on a boat, but that’s beside the point. If he doesn’t make a terrible mistake and dump her, then Sergeant Joey’s Lonely Heart Club is down to one member, and I know where my priorities lie.

Update: I was very emotional when I originally wrote the below post, and I realize I made an important mistake. It is not Quebec as a province, or the Quebecios as a people, who made the decision that upset me so much. It was the Government of Quebec, which is distinct. That being said, I feel the rest remains valid, so please understand that when I saw Quebec below, I specifically mean the government that made the decision, not the province or its residents in general.

I don’t write a lot of blogs at lunch anymore. I like more time to do my research, to edit, and to … eat. But today I found something that really pissed me off, and I want to talk about it while it’s fresh.

I found this article today, which is about Quebec deciding to ban kirpans in their provincial government, which they call the Quebec National Assembly, as though Quebec was a nation, not a province in the Dominion of Canada. A kirpan is a Sihk ceremonial knife, pictured here:

Now, it is a knife, and I don’t dispute that. However, it’s a religious item, which according to Wikipedia ” all baptised Sikhs must wear a kirpan at all times” and “is a tool to be used to prevent violence from being done to a defenseless person when all other means to do so have failed.”

This is not something a Sihk is going to use to attack someone. It’s not a security risk, any more than a cross is in the hands of a Christian. Sure, it could be used as a club, but that would be against the point, and however is doing that has lost the meaning of the symbols.

Canada has had a terrible history of dealing with Sihks, all the way back to the Komagata Maru.

Ship full of people with a legal right to enter Canada, but happen to wear turbans? Better send the Navy after them.

Sihks are allowed to wear the kirpan in every other provincial assembly, and the national assembly. The rest of the country understands the religious and spiritual significance of the kirpan, at least to the point that this can’t be considered just a knife.

What happened to multiculturalism?

Well, according to Louise Beaudoin, the Parti Quebecios secular critic, as quoted in the news article linked at the top, “while multiculturalism may be the official policy in Ottawa, it has never been a Quebec value.”

Seriously? Where does this asshole get off?

Do you think multiculturalism really came about for any other reason than to benefit Quebec? The rest of the country decided what Quebec thought and believed was important enough to respect, and as a beautiful side effect, ethnic, religious and cultural groups all over the country benefited. But Quebec doesn’t care for it?

They draw strength from their arguments due to the recent renouncing of multiculturalism as an ideal from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron. These nations, with longer histories than Canada, and a stricter cultural identity, are starting to ignore this noble ideal.

Well, if Quebec is no longer interested in multiculturalism, I’m no longer interested in protecting their language, their right to maintaining their culture. The dominate culture in Canada is English Speaking. If they don’t want to play anymore, if they aren’t willing to be part of a multicultural nation, they are done “Arret”ing at red octagons, and poutine just became cheese-gravy freedom fries. Seriously, the worst thing for Quebec would be if multiculturalism was repealed as a Canadian ideal.

Then again, they’ve never really considered themselves Canadian. That’s something I learned from Will Ferguson’s excellent book, “Why I hate Canadians“. They don’t consider themselves part of the country. They don’t seem to think they share our problems, our ideals, our responsibilities or our culture. They can’t leave Canada, because they were never part of it.

We’ve enabled this, English-speaking Canada. We’ve let them litter our cereal boxes with non-sense words and tie up our political system with costly referendums, all in honour of multiculturalism.

Which they don’t want anymore. So what’s to be done?

I’ll tell you what. French education, done. The Quebec National Assembly can become the Quebec Legislative Assembly, and they can pass their laws in English or not at all. The idea that something as ridiculus as the Parti Quebecios, which is now Quebec Party, well, that’ll be considered a terrorist group bent on destroying the singular nation of Canada. And in my Quebec Legislative Assembly, I’m going to allow kirpans.

But no French. Especially not the mangled joual that those St. Lawerence hill billies speak.

On certain nights, I like to imagine there is a girl, waiting. She stands on a footbridge, clenching an overcoat that is just a little too large for her. Under the cone of the street light, she pretends the cold that flushed her cheeks doesn’t bother her. The wind picks up a little, and her fist clenches tight on the front of her jacket. Hair whips across her face, but she waits for the gust to die down before she combs it back in place with her free hand.

A mist surrounds her, an icy frame on the edges of the electric halo of the lamp above. It rolls over the parts of the river below, steaming up where the last rivulet of moving water runs. She stares out into the darkness, her eyes the warmest part of her tiny winter world.

Absently, she lets lose her lapels, and rolls up the sleeve of the jacket to glance at her watch. Her mouth tightens, maybe in concern, maybe in disappointment. She shivers slightly and leans forward. With her elbows on the railing of the bridge, she hums softly to herself. She watches the steam on the free-flowing water, and glances at the edge of the bridge.

I know she’s waiting for me. She doesn’t need me, but she’d like me to be there. She’s just about ready to go on, but she lingers a little longer, absorbing the cold. She doesn’t need me, but she still hopes I’ll show up.

She’s trapped somewhere, in my mind’s eye, on this little bridge. I think about her every once in a while, on a cold night. Sometimes I wonder if she’s waiting there, wanting me to follow her, and find her story. I’m afraid to take her across the bridge.

The moment I do, I admit I made her up, that the girl isn’t waiting for me. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye, in case she’s out there somewhere, waiting on the bridge, staring at the watch, hoping I walk into the scene to say hello.

She lives with my parents, and is smart, adorable, and shy. I am obviously a dog person. Cats piss me off because we do everything for them, feed them, keep them safe, and they think they’re doing us a favour by hanging out. Dogs know that they owe you, and so they play with you, and come when you tell them, and do their best to keep you happy. They want to be near you and with you, and are, in every way superior to cats.

I live with a cat right now. I had to choose one of my many pictures of Bella, whom my parents got after I’d gone to university, so I never lived with her for more than a few months a year. Molly, the cat who lives in my house now, well, I couldn’t be bothered to pull out my BlackBerry and snap a picture of that uppity bitch.

I would love to get a dog again. I miss that constant companionship. Walking a dog would get me outside when the sun is out. When I had a bad day, I could depend on its unconditional love.

But I don’t want to be solely responsible for a dog. I still want to travel, and if you decide to spend three weeks in Egypt, or even five days in Mexico, it’s a pain in the ass to look after the dog. You need a kennel or a dog sitter, and when you get back Brutus is giving you that “You betrayed me” look of sorrow, and you know in your heart he’s right, you chose your pleasure over his. You don’t get to take a day off from a dog. You need to feed, and play, and walk, no matter what.

At least if you’re a good dog owner, which I would want to be.

Ideally, I’d want someone who was in there with me. Someone else who shares the playing, feeding, walking, training, loving responsiblity, so that on a bad day, or a busy day, the poor guy wouldn’t get neglected. This makes me think it’s best to wait until you have a family to get a dog. When you’re kids beg you for one, and you make them promise to feed it and walk it everyday, I think most parents know they’ll be doing all the work. When you hit that one bad day though, you can ask your kids why they didn’t do it, and blame them for screwing up, and you’re not off the hook, you’re teaching an important lesson.

Here’s the problem though; you know who else loved dogs? Cute girls.

Do NOT look for an image like this without Safe Search on...

But if you get the dog when you have a family, or even just a special lady friend who’s long term enough to share dog rearing responsibilities, well, you lose out on the cute girl draw of the puppy. There in lies the conundrum. I don’t want a puppy until I’m ready to settle down, but a puppy’s greatest power, the ability to draw in cute girls like a magnet, is useless once I’ve met my basic puppy having requirements.

So, if you’re reading this, you’re on the Internet, and there’s a decent chance you’re in Canada. The question I want to ask you is, have you heard about the changes coming to your internet bill? No? Well, they’re effective March 1st. I’d like to give you all the facts here, but … they’re hard to find, and I don’t represent any Canadian Internet Service Provider, so I don’t have all the answers.

In fact, that’s a big part of my problem here. So you’re a Canadian consumer, and you want the internet. You enter into a contract with your ISP, where they say we’ll give you unlimited internet and a modem, maybe a router, at $40 per month, and you need to sign a three year contract. This contract covers the service installation and the equipment you’ve rented, and if you cancel early, they need to recoup the costs, so you get a penalty.

That, to me, is far.

The part I don’t like is that the contract says they can change the rules at any time. So say, for example, they want to charge you for your home internet like they do for your mobile internet. They don’t need your permission. Your contract says they can change it at anytime. Why would you agree to that? Well, you want internet, don’t you? So there’s only one way to do it. You gotta play by Goliath’s terms.

And not the nice one from Disney's Gargoyles

Well, what stops them from screwing you over every step of the way? Well, the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission. They ensure that the giants of telecom play fair. The problem is, the giants of Telecom show up at their house everyday and whine about things. Like how they’d like to bill you for every MB that goes to your house. The CRTC gets tired of them, and listens, and then gives in.

Yep, the CRTC decided it would be fair if our internet companies were allowed to measure the amount of data being sent to our houses. The CRTC website is down right now, and the news sources I’m finding are listing limits around 25 GB per month.

So there are two problems I have with this; first of all, why does no one know about this? Well, it’s not news our ISPs want to give the customer. They’re hoping you won’t notice, and for a lot of people, 25 GB is a lot. Even if you’re on Facebook all the time, you’ll probably be fine. You can still do the sort of downloading most people chose to do on iTunes. But there are high end users who will notice, and a lot of them will find out when they either can’t surf anymore, or get high usage bills.

Now, I’m sure there were tiny little letters inserted into the bills that look like ads. If you get your bill online, there was probably a little message on your online account manager. It’s hard for them to communicate with customers. More importantly, it’s a complicated process. It’s hard to explain to most internet users how their measuring the transfer, or how big a GB is, or that everything you do does include a data transfer. It’s easier to just let it go and hope no one notices.

The ethics here hurt my head.

But the second reason we don’t know is because there’s something a bit more sinister going on here. See, almost every ISP in Canada is also a cable TV provider. The internet doesn’t really complete directly with TV, because even if you’re watching a lot of YouTube, for most people it doesn’t replace the 1/2 hour shows on TV. It’s not the same experience. It’s more active, requiring more choices more often, and it provides different content.

No, it’s another player that has spurred this change.

A beautiful new player

The company most likely to suffer from this move is Netflix. If you don’t know it, Netflix provides unlimited streaming movies and tv shows for about $8.00 per month. You chose what show or movie you want to watch, and it takes less than a minute to load, and if you have a video game consul, you can watch it on your tv. That’s an amazing deal, and a great way to consume media. It’s legal, it’s easier than downloading, and it could do for tv what iTunes did to music.

But you don’t really need cable then, do you? I mean, sure, if you want the newest shows, you still might. But if you want to watch exactly what you want, with no commercials, and are willing to wait a few months, this might be the service for you. I know I don’t watch cable, but the Netflix price is worth it for me.

So say you’re a Canadian ISP. Well almost everyone who provides internet in Canada is also a cable tv provider. And if you want to make $40 to $60 per month off of people for something they can get for $8, what are you going to do to protect it.

Well, you might whine to the CRTC, and get the rules changed, so that it suddenly becomes very expensive to stream tv and movies, if not impossible, due to transfer limits. If you don’t mention it to anyone, maybe you can get it passed through.

So please, look at your internet bills come March. Call your ISP and ask them to explain themselves. They won’t want to, and the first person who picks up the phone probably can’t. If you just accept it, they get their way.

But we can learn from them. They through hissy fits at the CRTC until they got their way. Trust me, the same thing works on them.

While I’m usually against internet petitions, as they are useless and dumb, there’s actually one of value for this issue. Openmedia.ca is showing up in the news reports on this, and they’re a real lobby group, not a Facebook petition no one cares about. The link above has a petition you can sign, which actually has a chance of impacting the CRTC.

Talk about this. Let people know if you don’t agree. Sign the petition. Make the CRTC pay attention, and make sure they know if your against this. Otherwise, you can be sure it will happen, and your internet bill maybe be a painful reminder…